April 11, 2000

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

'Shakespeare's Kings': Shakespeare and Historical Accuracy

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

SHAKESPEARE'S KINGS
The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485. By John Julius Norwich.
Illustrated. 401 pages. Scribner. $30.

he period covered by Shakespeare's nine English histories --
from "Edward III" and "Richard II" through the six Henry (IV,
V, VI) plays and ending with "Richard III" -- is one of the
bloodiest and most melodramatic in that island nation's past. It is
a period of almost continual fighting: in addition to the Hundred
Years' War with France and that destructive civil conflict known as
the Wars of the Roses, there were myriad plots, conspiracies and
intrigues pitting brother against brother and cousin against
cousin. As for the country's 14th- and 15th-century rulers, writes
John Julius Norwich in his colorful new book, they included "some
of the worst kings who have ever disgraced a throne." Only with
the rise of Henry Tudor (Henry VII) in 1485 would England be
ushered into a new era of "peace and tranquillity."

In "Shakespeare's Kings," Norwich -- the author of a
three-volume history of Byzantium, among other books, and a member
of the House of Lords -- sets out to assess just how closely the
playwright's works correspond to English history. He has written a
lively if not particularly scholarly book that turns the history of
England in the Middle Ages into a tempestuous chronicle of family
feuds and political machinations that reads like a Jacobean drama
crossed with "Dynasty" and "Dallas."

There is little pretense of objectivity in this volume: Norwich
freely pronounces his judgment on individual kings, not to mention
fictional Shakespearean characters, with cool aplomb. Edward II is
dismissed as a contemptible figure who "reduced the prestige of
the English crown to the lowest point in all its history." And
while Norwich credits his son, Edward III, with restoring some
respect to the throne, he adds that the "last 15 years of his life
had been increasingly clouded by a premature senility."

Richard II (grandson of Edward III) is chided for a
"combination of fecklessness and arrogance that caused his
downfall." And the man who dethroned him, Henry Bolingbroke (Henry
IV), is portrayed as "a usurper" who had broken "his vows of
fealty." His reign, Norwich suggests, was one "long anticlimax,"
with the king becoming, in his last five years, "a hopeless,
hideously disfigured invalid."

His son, Henry V -- the former Prince Hal who exchanged the
wayward ways of his youth for pious, even sanctimonious leadership
-- is described as a popular hero, but a "remarkably indifferent
general" who "won a glorious but largely undeserved victory" and
left "the country in no better state than he found it."

Henry VI, who would lose France, is dismissed as an "almost
pathetically easily led" king, "alarmingly lacking in political
judgment"; and Edward IV, as a decent enough ruler who grew
"prematurely aged by drink and debauch" and who opened the way
for usurpation by the baleful Richard III.

On the controversial matter of Richard III's villainy, Norwich
comes down firmly against those who hold that he was a
much-maligned monarch, arguing that he was "a man devoid of
conscience or principle, who would stop at nothing to achieve his
ambition." There is little doubt, Norwich argues, that Richard III
was responsible for the murder of the rightful heir to the throne,
12-year-old Edward V, and his younger brother.

So just how accurate were Shakespeare's English history plays?
Norwich's verdict: that "whatever liberties Shakespeare might take
with strict historical truth, in the essentials he was almost
invariably right." Although the Henry VI plays, written when
Shakespeare was still in his 20s, are decidedly less conscientious
than his later plays in hewing to the historical record,
divergences tend to be the result of the playwright's need to
compress vast sweeps of time into a manageable drama. Different
events were sometimes conflated; chronologies, violated; entire
episodes, ignored.

The other reasons Shakespeare departs from the facts, Norwich
observes, have to do with objections from the court censor, a
shortage of actors necessitating the elimination of minor
characters (and the attribution of their actions to others), simple
carelessness, and, most important, the need to make a more dramatic
play. Norwich suggests, for instance, that Shakespeare idealized
the historical John of Gaunt and made him into the grand old man of
his time to create a "dramatically necessary" counterpart to the
vapid Richard II. He similarly argues that Shakespeare turned the
unstable Hotspur into a "young man of dazzling brilliance,
unfailing courage and volcanic energy" because he saw him as a
potential star.

It is easy enough for the reader to disagree with some of
Norwich's assessments. When he veers off his subject into literary
criticism, for instance, his judgments can be deeply suspect: he
dismisses Falstaff in a phrase or two, as a "drunken poltroon"
who "obviously deserves all he gets."

Such dubious passages, however, do little, in the end, to
detract from Norwich's overall account -- a highly readable account
that one hopes will send readers back to more in-depth studies of
the period, and, of course, to Shakespeare's plays.